Elephant Plains
September 2026
Introducing Bush OSLaunching 2026
Where the signal ends, the safari begins.
Bush OS is the safari app that works with zero signal. Offline maps of the great reserves. Sightings shared across your convoy. And the name and story of the lion in front of you.
For iPhone and Android. Launching 2026 in Greater Kruger, Sabi Sand and the Maasai Mara.
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Three ways to see more,and protect what you see.
One app, one puck, one promise to the animals. Together they work anywhere the signal doesn't.
01
Bush OS
The safari app. Offline maps, sightings, animal ID, walkie-talkie and chat, with zero signal.
See the app 02BushLink
The puck. Clips to your vehicle and links every phone in your convoy, up to 15 km apart.
See the puck 03BushSense
The protection layer. Keeps rhino, pangolin and den sites invisible to anyone who shouldn't see them.
See the protection- 3 To log a sighting and share it with every vehicle in your Circle.
- 15 Vehicle to vehicle, no towers, no roaming. Further with every puck in between.
- 0 Needed for any of it. Maps, sightings, voice and chat all work with the signal gone.
- 10 Of everything we earn goes to the anti-poaching units on the ground. Written into the company.
The map turns onwith zero signal.
Every reserve, every track, every waterhole. On your phone before you leave the lodge, and still there when the last bar disappears.
Step one
Download the reserve before you leave the lodge.
Greater Kruger, the Mara, the Serengeti, the Okavango. Each one a bundle of satellite imagery and hand-checked detail that lives on your phone. About 180 MB, once.
Step two
Then the map turns on.
Contours, dry riverbeds, 4×4 tracks, hides, pans and concession boundaries. Drawn for the bush, not squeezed out of a road map.
Step three
Your position, straight from the sky.
GPS, GLONASS and Galileo, direct from the satellites. No towers, no bars, no roaming. The dot is gold here, and it never disappears.
Maps are rendered on the phone with MapLibre from regional vector bundles. Position comes from the phone's satellite receiver only.
Three taps,and the whole convoy knows.
Log a sighting faster than you can say "lions on the left". It's on your map, your guide's map and your lodge's map before the dust settles.
Tap one
What is it?
Lion, leopard, elephant, wild dog. The species you're most likely to see here come first, because the app knows where you are.
Tap two
How many, and what are they doing?
Count, behaviour, and a bearing from the phone's compass. Point it at the animals and the direction fills itself in.
Tap three
Log it. It's everywhere.
The pin lands on your map and, through BushLink, on every other vehicle in your Circle. No signal, no delay, no radio chatter.
Your photos come along for the ride. Focal length, time and the animal's ID are stitched into every frame.
Know whoyou're looking at.
Bush ID names the lion in front of you the way a guide does: ear notches, scars, mane, and the whisker spots that are as unique as a fingerprint. Then it tells you his story.
Themba
One
Pick what you can see.
Sector, sex, age, and the markers a guide looks for first. Three taps, no typing.
Two
Four hundred lions become two.
Every documented lion in the reserve is filtered in under a second, on the phone, without a network.
Three
Check the whisker spots.
The rows of spots above a lion's lip never change. Tap them on the screen to confirm the match, exactly as researchers do.
Four
Meet Themba.
Mother, coalition, territory, cubs and where he was last seen. The story behind the face, kept up to date by every Circle in the reserve.
Every animal has a field guide inside the app. Behaviour, diet, tracks, calls.
From aardvark to zebra, written by the people who guide for a living, with the tracks drawn to scale and the calls you'll hear at night. It works, like everything else, with no signal at all.
Identification uses deterministic trait keys and whisker-spot rows, the method taught by FGASA. No neural networks, so it runs on any phone and never "guesses". Lion and pride names shown are fictional.
Talk to the other vehiclewithout a word out loud.
Voice, text and a live map of your convoy, carried by BushLink instead of a cell tower. Quiet around the animals, clear when it matters.
Walkie-talkie
Push to talk. No towers, no licence, no crackle.
Hold the button and speak. Your voice hops from puck to puck to every vehicle in range, and lands as a memo they can play back.
Convoy chat
Or say nothing at all.
Quiet mode turns the whole convoy silent. Positions, distances and short messages, so a leopard hunt stays a leopard hunt.
Radar
Know where everyone is.
Every vehicle and the ranger base, with bearing and distance, on a map that needs nothing from the outside world.
Voice is compressed to a few kilobytes a second and carried vehicle to vehicle over the BushLink mesh on licence-free 868 MHz. Nothing leaves the reserve unless you want it to.
One trip. One journal.Everyone's.
Your vehicle, your lodge, your family. A Safari Circle merges everyone's sightings, photos and notes into a journal that writes itself, page by page, day by day.
Elephant Plains
Lions · 2 · resting
Themba and a lioness in the reeds at Sand River. He lifted his head once, decided we weren't interesting, and went back to sleep.
Elephants · 14 · moving
A breeding herd crossing the road at Nyala Pan, two calves tucked between the cows. Anna counted; the kids counted differently.
Black rhino · 1
Location protected by BushSense. This page keeps the moment and nothing else: no coordinates, no time-of-day map, no trail for anyone to follow.
- 23sightings
- 9species
- 84 kmdriven
Every stop, every pin, every photo, stitched onto the day's route. Merged from both vehicles the moment they were back in range of each other.
Take it home.
Or let the lodge send it.
Export the journal as a book, a PDF or a lodge-branded memory for departing guests. Guides get the credit. Everyone gets the story.
Light enough for the phonein a tracker's pocket.
Bush OS was built for a five-year-old Android with 2 GB of memory and a cracked screen, so it flies on everything else. No neural networks, no bloat, no waiting.
- 2 Of memory is all it needs. The cheapest Android in the lodge runs it well.
- 60 On a 2 GB phone in 40 °C shade. The map never stutters.
- 0 To the network, ever, unless you ask it to sync at the lodge.
Same app on both. Same maps, same Circle, same lion.
A guide on a rugged Android and a guest on the newest iPhone see the same sighting land at the same moment. There's no "lite" version, because the light version is the version.
Flutter on iOS and Android 8 and up. Identification runs on structured trait tables, not on-device machine learning, so it needs no GPU and no cloud.
BushLink
BushLink
Meet the puckthat makes it all work.
A rugged little radio that clips to your vehicle. It talks to your phone over Bluetooth, and to every other puck within 15 kilometres over long-range radio. It doesn't need a signal. It is the signal.
- 5–15 kmvehicle to vehicle
- 4–6 dayson one charge
- IP68dust, mud, river crossings
Fifteen kilometresof no signal at all.
Long-range radio carries your sightings, your voice and your position from puck to puck across the open veld. Every vehicle extends the reach for every other.
One puck
Five to fifteen kilometres, line of sight.
The same radio technology that tracks cargo ships and water meters, tuned for the bush: low power, licence-free, and unbothered by heat, dust or distance.
Every puck
Each vehicle is a relay.
A message that can't reach the far vehicle directly hops through the one in between. Three vehicles cover a reserve. A lodge fleet covers a region.
The base
The ranger base hears it too.
Lodges and anti-poaching units run a puck on the roof. Your convoy's positions, and your SOS, reach them without a single cell tower.
LoRa on 868 MHz (Europe and southern Africa) or 915 MHz where required. Range depends on terrain; ridge-to-ridge is longer, thick riverine bush is shorter. Extend it with every puck in the mesh.
When it matters,everyone hears you.
A flat tyre at dusk. A guest who needs a doctor. A vehicle that hasn't checked in. Hold the button on the puck and every vehicle and ranger base in range gets your exact position.
- Vehicle 2 · Anna0.9 km
- Vehicle 3 · Sipho3.8 km
- Ranger base4.6 km
- Broadcasts your position to within a few metresFrom the puck's own satellite fix, even if your phone is flat
- Reaches every vehicle and base in the meshRepeats until someone acknowledges
- Never sends by accidentThree-second hold on a recessed button
Built like a piece of kit,not a gadget.
Sealed, strapped and magnet-mounted. BushLink is made to live on a roll cage through dust, mud and river crossings, and to come home on the charge it left with.
- Long-range radio
- Semtech SX1262 LoRa · 868 / 915 MHz · 5–15 km line of sight
- Phone link
- Bluetooth 5.0 · iPhone, Android and rugged tablets
- Battery
- 2,000 mAh · 4–6 days of tracking · USB-C
- Protection
- IP68 · sand, mud, rain, submersion
- Mounting
- Silicone roll-cage strap · brass carabiner · magnetic roof base
- Emergency
- Recessed SOS button · own satellite fix · 3-second hold
- Weight
- 96 g · fits in a shirt pocket
Some sightingsshould stay secret.
BushSense is the protection layer inside Bush OS. It hides the animals poachers hunt, holds back the sightings that draw crowds, and gives rangers a channel of their own. It's on for everyone, and it can't be switched off.
- Location blackoutRhino · pangolin · wild dog dens
Coordinates are stripped on the phone itself, before anything is saved or shared. What your Circle gets is the moment, offset by 15 to 30 kilometres.
- The 24-hour delayPredator kills · territorial fights
Reach public feeds a day late, so no one races to a carcass. Your Circle sees them as they happen; the crowd doesn't.
- The ranger channelAccredited anti-poaching units
An encrypted channel for snare lines, incursions and SOS relays, carried over the same BushLink mesh your convoy uses.
Partner with us
For reserves, lodges and anti-poaching units.
High-risk species are defined with the reserves and updated as threats change. Rangers' channels are end-to-end encrypted and never leave the mesh without their say.
Ten percent of everything,to the people on the ground.
Written into the company, not into a marketing plan. A tenth of gross revenue, from every subscription, every puck and every lodge licence, goes to the anti-poaching units, ranger dog teams and community conservancies that keep the animals alive.
- Gross, not netTaken off the top, before salaries, servers or marketing.
- Chosen with the reservesVerified units only, nominated by the places we operate in.
- Paid quarterly, published yearlyEvery rand and shilling, in a report anyone can read.
Timbavati Anti-Poaching UnitMara Elephant ProjectZambezi SocietySabi Sand ranger K9 unitBlack Mambas APUKruger community conservanciesSerengeti de-snaring teamsOkavango wild dog research
Named organisations are intended beneficiaries of the Foundation, not endorsers of AfriBush. The first distributions follow the 2026 launch.
Where it works,and where it's going.
We start where the lions are best known and the guides are the best in the world. Then we follow the migration north.
- Phase 1South Africa & KenyaLaunching 2026Greater Kruger, Sabi Sand, Timbavati, Madikwe, Kgalagadi · Maasai Mara, Amboseli, Tsavo, Samburu
- Phase 2Tanzania & Botswana2027Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Ruaha · Okavango, Chobe, Central Kalahari
- Phase 3Namibia, Zimbabwe & Zambia2027Etosha, Damaraland, Hwange, Mana Pools, South Luangwa
- Phase 4Rwanda & Uganda2028Volcanoes, Bwindi, Queen Elizabeth, Akagera
Hover a phase to see its reserves on the map. Dates are plans, not promises; reserves join as their guides and rangers do.
Pick your safari.Pay for the trip, or for the life.
Launch pricing for travellers, guides and lodges. Every plan includes BushSense and pays ten percent forward.
-
Safari Pass14 days · one reserve
All the maps of one reserve, Bush ID, your Circle and the journal. Perfect for one trip.
$14.99onceGet early access -
Annual ExplorerEvery reserve, all yearMost people choose this
Every reserve we cover, lineage trees, the full field guide, and journal exports for every trip.
$49.99a yearGet early access -
Lifetime PatronEverything, forever
All of Bush OS for life, an engraved brass patron badge and a waterproof field notebook in the post.
$199onceGet early access -
BushLinkThe puck
One puck links your vehicle to the convoy. Fleet pricing for lodges with five or more.
$89–129eachReserve BushLink -
Lodge fleet licenceFor guides and operators
Dispatch, convoy radar, ranger channels and branded guest journals across your vehicles.
from $150a monthPartner with us
Launch pricing, subject to change. Prices in US dollars; local pricing follows in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana.
Be on the first drive.Launching 2026.
Early access opens reserve by reserve. Tell us where you safari and we'll write when Bush OS is ready there, with a BushLink reserved if you want one.
You're on the list.
We'll write when the first drive is ready in your reserve. Until then, look up: the signal's better out there anyway.